October 2026

This post first appeared on the Kowalski blog . It's written for people who have never heard of Kowalski, so let's start at the beginning.

Kowalski is a small team of AI agents that lives on your own computer and does chores for you. Not a chatbot you have to keep talking to, and not a platform you have to administer. You hand it a job, it does the job, and you get a file back. It's open source (MIT), written in Rust, and it runs on a free local model through Ollama , or on any hosted model with your own key.

There are two well-known open-source projects in the same neighbourhood, and they help to explain what Kowalski is by what it isn't. OpenClaw is a personal assistant you chat with: it gets wide access to your machine and your apps, and it works best with a big frontier model behind it. Paperclip goes one level up: it runs a whole "company" of paid coding agents, with org charts, budgets and approvals. Both are impressive. Kowalski makes the opposite bet.…